#1 Satirical and political comedies, that claim a formal hybridity
Madame Hyde by Serge Bozon
« The basic shift is that the film starts out a bit like a comedy and doesn't end up like a comedy at all. There is a confusion that rises little by little. » Serge Bozon
With his latest movie Madame Hyde (2017), Serge Bozon offers, with a zany and electric comedy look, a real social and political reflection on the greatness of teaching and the difficulties that come with it. Loosely based on from Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Madame Hyde tells the story of Mrs. Géquil, a physics teacher in a professional high school. Shy, she is constantly victimized by her colleagues and students. After being struck by lightning during an experiment in her laboratory, her personality is gradually transformed.
As Mrs. Géquil (Isabelle Huppert) begins to develop « special powers » after her electrocution, the movie brilliantly shifts into the bizarre, the fantasy, the comical, and some spectators will certainly be puzzled, not knowing which side to hold on to. And this is what undoubtedly makes the charm and the strength of the film.
Serge Bozon managed with his co-writer Axelle Ropert, to avoid the traps of the genre film in order to make his movie a hybrid cinematographic object, always evolving, almost alive. He pushed back, to the point of absurdity, the limits of normality of a movie on education thanks to extreme contrasts to better bring out the comedy. As a result, Madame Hyde reverses in a jubilant way all the clichés of the representations of teachers, suburban students, men and women, family, disability. Madame Hyde is therefore at the same time a social film, where skin color, rap and the suburbs are more than just a setting. It is a fantasy film, which relies on a transformation of the protagonist, and a film about school, in the simplest sense of the term: why should knowledge be transmitted and how should it be transmitted? And why is it so important and so hard to transmit it?
The dress gags, the visual effects and the surreal dialogues are also very enjoyable and are part of an imagery that contributes greatly to the understanding of the story, sometimes reminding of photo novels. As the director skilfully maintains suspense and surprise, the movie never goes where one would expect. Indeed, Mrs Géquil is not a monster, she is a fairy, an incandescent fairy, who shows us the way for a better world.
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I hope you will enjoy these first three articles, and that they will make you eager to discover these films. See you next month for an exploration of the comedy of manners among women filmmakers. Keep on laughing!
